The Suffolk County district attorney’s office is appealing to the public for help in identifying “Montauk Mary,” an elderly woman who was found shot to death in Montauk in the spring of 1978.
The case is one of three homicides involving never-identified victims added to the D.A.’s website this week in recognition of National Cold Case Month. Each incident is accompanied by a newly rendered forensic sketch approximating what the victim may have looked like shortly before death.
According to the description, a body was discovered by a passer-by in East Overlook Park (the east overlook, near Camp Hero), around 12:30 p.m. on March 22, 1978, and reported it to law enforcement. Town police responded and found the body of a white woman, likely in her 60s, with short gray hair and hazel eyes, lying face-up, about 15 feet away from the overlook’s parking lot. They described her as about five feet tall and around 200 pounds, wearing a plaid tweed coat, a multicolored dress, and orange slippers.
The Star reported the discovery of a “mystery” woman’s body the following week, and included the additional details of a mole on her right cheek and white ankle-length socks under her slippers. Police had circulated photos and an artist’s sketch of the woman locally, the story continued, and the chief at the time, John Henry Doyle, said the department had received a number of tips about individuals matching the description, but that those leads had all “turned up alive.”
The case was again referenced in The Star in 1989, when a county homicide detective commented that “about six file cabinets devoted to dead-end leads” had been accumulated, but that the identity of the woman detectives were calling “Montauk Mary” continued to elude them.
This week’s description includes some previously undisclosed details. The county medical examiner determined that the victim had been shot four times, once in the chest and three times in the legs, and estimated that she’d been killed just a few hours before her body was discovered, adding that there were no identifying “tags” in her clothing, and that she was not wearing undergarments.
Earlier this year, the D.A.’s Cold Case Task Force worked with Danielle Gruttadaurio, a forensic artist from the County Police Department, to create an updated sketch of the woman, and versions in black and white and color have been posted on the website alongside the case description.
One of the other two cold cases added to the website this week was of “Melville John Doe,” a Hispanic male whose body — with one end of a pair of handcuffs secured around its left wrist — was found on a property in Melville in 1990, shot multiple times. The other was “Brentwood John Doe,” a white or Hispanic male believed to have been between 15 and 17 years old, whose skeletal remains were found near the Freshman Center Elementary School in Brentwood in 1998.
“Each cold case represents a person who matters deeply to someone,” District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney said of the initiative in a press release issued on Monday. “Adding their cases to our website not only honors the victims’ memory, but also provides new pathways for the public to contribute meaningfully to longstanding investigations.”
Anyone with information about the cases, or about the identities of the victims, is asked to contact the D.A.’s office by emailing [email protected] or calling 631-263-0526. A reward of up to $2,000 is offered for information that leads to an identification.
